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Comment by _jal | Hacker News Reader

Ugh, I won't use their phone app, they're way too slimy to live there.

They conveniently forget your mail settings periodically, too, forcing you to opt-out of various garbage again, or to just trash all the mail. They're at least as scummy as FB, if not worse.

My (related) new rule: if your site demands a phone number for an account, I will not create an account on your site.

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I’m not a fan of giving phone numbers out either. When I have to I give one to sites I hold suspect I use a number from the safe fictitious range allowed for use on TV and in movies. It’s like example.org but for phone numbers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number)

Unfortunately many times that's not an option because they won't let you create or use the account until you verify the number (Google, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, most of the big social networks).

TIL. Cool trick.

I used to do something similar when a site I visited demanded an email address. I just used "mm@disney.com" (Mickey Mouse). Eventually, sites started verifying the given email address so that didn't work anymore. Now I just have a "burner" email address for such cases.

Truly disposable burner emails are the best, though many larger corps block the more popular ones or require an email at specific providers. https://www.mailinator.com/

Buy a domain name and point the MX record to mailinator.

I usually look up the company's sales number and give them their own number. I have no idea if this has ever inconvenienced anyone but it does give me a moment of petty satisfaction.

Very cool trick! Wonder if Europe has this as well.

For email I use <site>JGM.io (my own domain). If I see that address being used elsewhere I know who's being a bad boy

Gmail let's you add tags to your email like firstnamelastname+linkedin@gmail.com. This is really useful for such purposes.

I would have thought most everybody serious about exploiting your data would be rewriting this type of email at this point.

That is true, but is also blocked by many sites. No such thing can happen to a custom domain.

Do you have an example of a site that blocks this? I don’t use gmail anymore but used this trick for many years and wasn’t blocked once.

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